Monday, February 8, 2010

Agent Orange health effects expanded

I would hope that all Veterans who were on the ground from 1962 to 1975 in Vietnam, know that they may qualify for disability compensation and health care benefits. A recent independent study by the VA added recognized disses that include lung cancer, prostate cancer and Hodgkins disease to the already know disses of Parkinson's disease, B cell leukemia ischemic heart disease.

While this new process is very long, 23 pages of instruction, vets are encouraged to contact the local veterans rep and go to VA.gov to get more information. If a veteran dies of any of these agent orange diseases, he is presumed to have died as a result of him being in a combat zone and his property taxes are reduced for 5 years... something I never even heard of.

This country owes the veterans of the Vietnam War and their families, every drop of care money can buy and I hope anyone who knows a veteran from that era makes an effort to help get the word out. Considering 1 out of 3 homeless people are Vets, some may fall through the cracks and may never know they are entitled to health care and disability compensation.

The next forgotten group of Veterans with war related health care issues are from the Desert Storm wars and I hope that the Feds come to terms with the clear evidence that shows those vets have some of the very same health care problems as their counterparts from Vietnam.

1 Comments:

At February 8, 2010 at 11:40 AM , Blogger Old soldier said...

Good infor Jim and important for vet to have. THe difficult part is getting this information to the vets who are on the streets. They are often there because of issues related to their service, and yet we don't have a program in place to search these vets out and get them the help they deserve and the health services they deserve, even though getting these services to them could help get them off the streets. We have got to do a better job of this. We have a whole round of new vets who will be coming home with known, and unknown issues. We need to do a better job of helping them before they end up on the street than we did with the Viet Nam vets.

 

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